the population and culture of African descent are more evident , such an argumentative line sustains that only a few slaves were brought to the Argentine territory and they were " treated well and even with affection ." They practiced some musical traditions , but became extinct as they were disappearing and positioning themselves against the surrounding culture and society as if they were water and oil . At least with respect to music , the national identity was reduced in such a manner from three to two foundational roots : aboriginal and creole , in chronological order . This double death certificate — they could not reproduce themselves and their culture neither influenced nor remained in the present — was challenged by sound ethnographic investigations in approximately onethird of the Argentinean territory : the provinces of Corrientes , Chaco , Santa Fe , Entre Ríos , Buenos Aires and Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ), and by historical research in almost every aspect of the Argentine music : folk or traditional , academic and popular ( jazz , rock — in broad sense — and tango ). I have been publishing the results in paper , audio , video and internet . However , nothing seemed to be sufficient for a sample in the path of our music during the last two centuries . So , what did the exhibition show ? The hidden script of the only two images used ( one of foreign origin ) is the old and familiar discourse — falling short of the current state of the art — with at least a century of delay that does not satisfy almost anyone , starting with some Afro-Argentines who visited the exhibition and left more disappointed than me , because they carry the painful and silent history of exclusion and alienation on their own body : " If you see a black on the street , it is from another country , isn ´ t it ?". Then , what does the old and familiar discourse bring ? The only space-time coordinate for locating the Afro- Argentine music is the past , more accurately in the Rosas ´ s epoch with its candombes for the tyrant , despised as lascivious and demonic by the so-called unitary whites , such as the historian José María Ramos Mejía , mentioned in the exhibition . The issue was illustrated with a version of the well-known painting by Martin Boneo Federal candombe , Rosas ´ epoch ( ca . 1905 ). Facing it , inexplicably , the second and last image on the subject is a picture by Pedro Figari depicting a Uruguayan candombe . Herein comes the second commonplace of academic thinking about this music : Everything was more or less the same . With more or less tambour , the Uruguayan can give account of the subject , since the speculation is that both margins of the River La Plata share a common past , the so-called River Plate music . If this comment may sound like unnecessary suspicion , then the same criteria could be applied for displaying joropo as an Argentinean creole genre , since Creoleness is more or less the same elsewhere and there weren ´ t national borders . Also , a bust of Chopin would have been suited in the section of academic music , because his compositions were played in Argentina and our musicians imitated him until satiety . That was not done . So , why did they do it with the Afro-Argentine music ? In the middle of the 20th century , Néstor Ortiz Oderigo said that , regarding the black people , “ everybody dare to do something and they dare to do everything ”. To make things worse , the intentional use of the black color to demonstrate the ideological limitations of musical expression during the military dictatorship emphasizes that black is exclusively used in negative sense . What an undeserved prize for our colonial and republican past ! Let ´ s recall that we took advantage of the
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